


the priest thinks it's the devil, my mom thinks it's the flu

by goodbyechunkylemonmilk



Series: self-indulgent writing exercises [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Muggle, Coming Out, F/F, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Internalized Homophobia, Mental Health Issues, Prom, Rule 63, Self-Acceptance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-06
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2018-11-28 11:29:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11417022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodbyechunkylemonmilk/pseuds/goodbyechunkylemonmilk
Summary: Sirius has been in love with James for as long as she can remember, a feeling so all-encompassing that it even colors memories from before they met, which would bother her if she had any childhood memories worth preserving. She's reasonably sure that he feels the same way, which makes the unfailingly platonic nature of their relationship equal parts baffling and infuriating.





	1. 'cause i was the only one who loved you from the start

**Author's Note:**

> I have a lot of very strong opinions about the ways James and Sirius would fit into the modern political world, and they didn't come into play a LOT here but they probably will and the point of this note is just to say that I don't agree with something just because I had one of them say it. I love both of these characters but we probably would not be friends.

James, despite the "this is what a feminist looks like" t-shirt that he bought to impress girls, is a traditionalist at heart, which means Sirius has been waiting five years for him to sack up and ask her out already. He’s _that_ kind of guy, the one who has to make the first move. He has a Pinterest board full of moonlit parks and five-star restaurants and beaches at dawn, places he can see himself proposing to a woman someday, even though he’s had exactly three girlfriends for a grand total of two weeks in his entire life. She finally loses her patience in their junior year, when James decides the time spent waiting for Remus and Peter to get through the lunch line is best spent telling her at length about a Facebook group made for the boys of their class to “claim” prom dates so that they’re not going for the same girls. It’s a boring story full of infighting among people whose names she can barely even match to faces, but James tells it with the same excitement with which he does everything, waving his hands around and talking through a full mouth.

 

“Who’s picked me then?” Sirius interrupts, to keep James from reading a comment thread of “promposal” ideas. He stops, mercifully, halfway through Amos Diggory’s grammatically-challenged description of the unforeseen difficulties of renting a fleet of hot air balloons.

“Do you even care? You’ve turned down every guy who’s asked you out before now, so I didn’t think prom would be any different.”

Sirius has always considered her unapproachability to be one of her better qualities; unlike James, she never gets approached by students who need tutoring, or teachers who need errands run. People don’t even ask her for directions on the street. It’s something in the way she carries herself, she thinks, or the look in her eyes. She has never considered that James, impossibly confident and comfortable inserting himself into her personal space, might be affected by whatever vibe it is she’s putting out.

“I would say yes, if it were the right guy.” She feels her cheeks heating up a bit as she says it, sure that he can read between the lines.

“Oh!” James smiles, and Sirius’ face heats up further, until she’s sure she must be as red as a traffic light. “Well, last I checked, not that I’ve been watching super carefully or anything, it was about a twelve-way war. I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but Gideon Prewett has some pretty big plans, and he’s already put down a couple deposits, so I think he’ll win out.”

“What about you? Who are you asking?” Sirius tries to keep your voice flat, the hope scrubbed out of it, though she isn’t sure she succeeds.

“I’m not sure. Lily Evans, maybe. She’s cute.”

Sirius squints at him across the table, considering and quickly discarding the possibility that he’s just trying to maintain the surprise factor. James has never been capable of deception, because he has never needed to be. His parents know exactly how many drinks he’s had at every party he’s ever been to, and that he took exactly one bite of a weed brownie at a music festival he dragged Sirius to, and that he’s currently a virgin but hopefully not for long. She can see, in the steady way he maintains eye contact, that he means it, that he’s thinking about asking Lily, and she is, very suddenly, sick of it. She’s caught him staring at her more than once just since they started talking, and he always looks furious when she gets asked out in front of him, and it all feels so stupid, the way they’ve been dancing around saying what needs to be said. She smiles a little, leans in, conscious of the people around them the way she usually isn’t with him, and says, voice low, “Why don’t you just ask me?”

James chuckles. “Yeah, that _would_ be a lot easier, wouldn’t it?” There’s a split second where Sirius could laugh along, pretend that it was a joke, but she misses her window stewing in nauseated horror, and James’ smile fades. “Oh. Wow. Sirius—”

“Forget it,” she says, trying to keep her voice steady through the pain of a loss she never prepared herself for. She doesn’t have much in her life that she can count on, and so James has been _it_ , for as long as she’s had him, and she can barely stand to look at him now that she’s lost even that. “It was stupid. Just pretend I never said anything.”

“I just had no idea you felt that way. I’m sorry if I did anything to—to mislead you or get your hopes up or something, but I’m just a little blindsided right now.” James looks at her the way someone might look at a car crash, which is to say, with a sort of voyeuristic pity. It isn’t so different, she realizes, from the way he always looks at her, and she seeks refuge in the anger that is at least slightly better than misery.

“You get to look at my eyes about half as often as you look at my tits, or you get to act like I’m stupid for thinking you could be into me, but you don’t get to do both.”

James jerks back as if she’s hit him, catching himself just before he falls off of the bench. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I—”

Sirius laughs, aiming for cruel and falling just short. “I don’t care about that. Look where you want, but I just don’t see why—” She stops, swallowing hard against the lump in her throat. “I don’t see why you’re acting like you’re not attracted to me when you _obviously_ are. It’s stupid.”

“I just don’t want this to change things between us.” James reaches across the table and grabs her hand before she can move it to her lap, holding it tight between both of his. He looks her in the eyes as if to prove a point, and says, “Your friendship is _so_ important to me, Sirius. You’re obviously beautiful, and amazing, and absolutely anyone would be lucky to have you.”

“Except you. I get it.”

“Don’t be angry. That isn’t fair.” James makes the face he always makes when she disappoints him, the longsuffering one that has always felt the slightest bit performative, even when they don’t have an audience. The wide, wondering eyes and turned-down mouth that say _aren’t I a saint?_ The truth is that he puts up with more than anyone else would, and so she tries not to mind a bit of condescension now and again.

“I’m not angry,” Sirius says, which isn’t quite true, though she wishes it were. “I just feel—stupid, and embarrassed, and a little sad, okay? I’m _sorry_ my emotions aren’t as neat and tidy as you’d like them to be.” This is very true, though she wishes desperately that it weren’t. She pulls away, James' nails catching briefly on the skin of her wrist. “I don’t need you to coddle me. Despite what you seem to think, I am not a complete child, all right? I don’t need you to _literally_ handhold me; I just need some space.”

Remus and Peter have finally succeeded in getting their warm milk and cold pizza, approaching the table just as she stands up to leave. She only resists the urge to smack Peter’s tray out of his hand because she doesn’t want to prove James’ point for him, what he won’t say but which she suspects is the crux of the matter: he doesn’t mind having a crazy girl for a best friend, but he certainly doesn’t want to _date_ one.

James doesn’t follow her, but Sirius chooses the girls’ bathroom as her refuge anyway, just to be safe. She sets herself up on the window ledge, pulls her legs close to her body so that nothing’s visible from the door, and then holds herself very, very still and focuses on taking slow, even breaths, determined not to cry. James is in history with her, and math, and English, all AP classes she signed up for back when she assumed his presence would always be a positive, and two weeks out from a hearing in truancy court, she’ll have no choice but to face him within the hour.

Sirius leans her head against the window, hot from the afternoon sun. She’s the most important person in James’ life now, but she isn’t stupid; for someone who already knows where he wants to get his MBA, James is shockingly naïve about the actual progression of life. He’s going to be a young professional, and make young professional friends, and shape himself a life that she won’t fit into, unless she can force her way in, make herself someone who can’t be left behind so easily. James thinks that whatever’s broken inside of her can be fixed by sticking printouts from self-help websites through the slats of her locker with sweet notes scrawled across the top—You can get through this! :) I believe in you! :) I’ll always be here for you! :)

She’s saved all of them, stuck in the same carefully-cut hole in her mattress where she keeps a bottle of vodka, but she knows already that whatever’s wrong with her isn’t so easily fixed. Someday, James is going to figure out what’s been obvious to everyone else for years, and not soon after that, he’s going to get sick of carrying dead weight and getting nothing in return.

Just as she’s on the verge of losing control, the door slams open and in walks Lily Evans, student government treasurer and all-around insufferable goody two shoes. Sirius has never before seen her with so much as a hair out of place, but now her ponytail, ordinarily high on the crown of her head, has been tugged halfway out and droops at the nape of her neck. As Sirius watches, she yanks the elastic the rest of the way out and throws it on the floor. Her hands clench at either side of the porcelain sink while she stares at herself in the mirror, taking measured breaths that Sirius knows all too well.

“Excuse me, but do you think your nervous breakdown is going to take very long?” Sirius asks. She ought to be sympathetic, and knows it, but generosity has never come easily to her, particularly on her worst days, of which there are more than she would like.

Lily jumps at the sound of her voice, eyes wide and just a bit red, but she recovers quickly, moving further into the room so that they’re looking each other in the eye. “I don’t know, Black, but you’ve been having yours for about two years now, so why don’t you tell me?”

Sirius laughs, entertained despite herself. “Damn, where have you been hiding that personality?”

“Fuck you.” Lily turns away, but rejection from the only person she never expected has left Sirius wanting to fight, so she gets to her feet and follows, hoping she looks further from tears than Lily does.

“What are you so upset about? Did they discontinue your favorite brand of highlighters? Are you not getting perfect attendance this year?”

“Look, Black, ordinarily I’d be happy to stand in this bathroom and trade barbs with you until you went crying to your boyfriend, but I’m actually not having the best day, so could you just find somewhere else to smoke your shitty clove cigarettes or cut class or whatever illicit thing you’re hiding out in here to do?”

“I was here first,” Sirius says, feeling as she does the childishness of it, the slight whine in her voice. “You’re not the only one allowed to have a bad day, you know.”

“Oh _no_! Was Potter’s ‘promposal’ not lavish enough? Did he get you the wrong type of flowers?” Lily rolls her eyes and drops the cloying, faux-sympathetic tone she’s been using. “Some of us have real problems.”

“Well, what’s so bad in your picturesque fucking life? Did the walking grease ball you call a best friend finally make a move, and now you have to figure out whether you can possibly put your mouth on _that_?” Lily stiffens, her fists clenched at her sides. Even disheveled and furious and standing too close for comfort to an unidentified puddle, she looks _sweet_ , like the kind of girl who meets her friends’ parents when she’s invited over for dinner and not because she needs a place to stay after a particularly bad fight at home, the kind of girl who will get into all but one of the colleges she applies to and make the practical choice, the kind of girl James probably wants. Sirius hates her, in that moment, more than she has ever hated anyone, more even than she hates her parents, and so she goes in for the kill, laughing as she does. “Oh, wow, I’m right, aren’t I? I have to tell you, Evans, you’re not all that pretty, and with the exception of the last five minutes, you have the personality of a wet paper bag, but you can do better, if only because literally everyone in the world can.”

Lily shuts her eyes and takes a breath, letting it out slowly, and then another. When she looks at Sirius again, she smiles, just a little, the mask apparently back in place. “I’m very sorry,” she says, seeming to mean it, “I really am, about whatever it is in your past that made you such a _complete and utter nightmare_ to be around, so I’m just going to be the bigger person, all right? Congratulations, you get to brood alone in a bathroom. What a big win.”

Lily storms out before Sirius can come up with a rejoinder better than, “You certainly _are_ the bigger person,” and then she’s alone, just like she wanted, but Lily’s words, which hit closer to home than she would like, have left her feeling empty. She wedges herself back into her hiding spot and, finally, lets herself cry.


	2. tell me i'm a screwed up mess, that i never listen, listen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My high school had the weird claiming dates FB group that I wrote into this. I have no idea if that's common or what but trust that I spent a LOT of time complaining that it was demeaning to women in addition to being heteronormative, and trust also that everyone wanted me to shut up.

James spends two weeks using Peter’s ass-kissing presence as a buffer and looking like he’s going to vomit every time Sirius tries to talk to him about something more personal than the weather. Being with James has never felt unnatural before, not even when they had just met, his my-parents-love-me confidence carrying them straight through those first potentially awkward conversations. The loss stings, even more than the initial rejection.

Sirius spends her suddenly endless free time trying to figure out what makes Lily so special, since her other option seems to be obsessing over how she’s ruined the only truly good thing in her life. Lily is prettier than Sirius is willing to admit, one of the only other girls in their grade to have fully escaped the indignity of puberty and come out the other side clear-faced and comfortable in her skin. Equipped with the newfound edge she displayed when she and Sirius met in the bathroom, she’s almost interesting as well. Snape, previously glued to her side at all times, seems to have disappeared from her life, and the dissolution of a close yet entirely inexplicable friendship has brought out the worst in her, her Nice Girl persona slipping to reveal someone sarcastic and just the slightest bit bitchy, someone Sirius wouldn’t mind getting to know if she didn’t represent a stinging failure.

By week three, James must decide that he’s given Sirius more than enough time to move on, because he swaggers into their chemistry class, slumps into the seat next to hers, and starts talking as if nothing has happened. "I heard from a guy on the team who has this class first period that Slughorn is going to assign group projects today, and I'm thinking this could be my shot at Lily, so I'm going to sit next to her. I just wanted to give you a heads up, since we usually work together.” He doesn’t look at her until he’s done speaking, and then, just as she’s decided to resign herself to this new world order in which they’ll never be totally comfortable around each other again, he turns to her with the same expression on his face that got her to go to all of his soccer practices, three separate Nickelback concerts, and Easter dinner at his uncomfortably devout grandmother’s house. It’s so achingly familiar that she gives her assent before she’s even conscious of it, and somehow manages a smile as well. James smiles back, so sincere that Sirius is ashamed to have ever doubted him. “Thanks. I know that things have been sort of weird lately, and it’s so important to me that you know that nothing could ever change us.” He waits, eyes locked on hers, until she nods. “Good. We’re going to get through this, all right? Talk later.” He dashes across the room to sit next to Lily before someone else can claim the empty seat, leaving Sirius feeling like she’s been struck by some kind of natural disaster, a hurricane of relentless and slightly insufferable positivity.

Her newfound goodwill lasts until James smiles at Lily, just as bright and earnest as he was with Sirius, and then the urge to either cry or hit something resurfaces. Instead of doing either, Sirius turns to Remus, who seems to her to have appeared out of nowhere, but more likely arrived with James and witnessed everything. “Remus, do you think I’m pretty?” He looks at her like she’s rightfully accused him of murder, mouth agape, eyes practically popping out of his skull. Sirius smiles. “Of course you do, stupid question. Everyone does. So _what_ , I would like to know, is James’ stupid self-denying problem?”

“Sirius, I—”

“It was fucking rhetorical.” Sirius looks at Remus, but it’s a wasted effort; he’s staring, with an intense focus that feels artificial, down at his hands. “Unless. Unless you think you have an answer, for real?” She regrets the words as soon as it’s too late; every day for the last two weeks, she has resolved to be normal, to be over it, and every day for the last two weeks, she’s ended up moping around like self-pity personified. None of the relationships she had while waiting for James to come to his senses managed to affect her even a fraction as much, leaving her with what has turned out to be an entirely inaccurate perception of her own emotional fortitude.

Remus sighs and looks up from the homework they both know Slughorn isn’t going to check. “James cares about you, Sirius, _so_ much. I‘m sorry it isn’t in the way you’d like, and I know that hurts. But lashing out isn’t going to fix anything. Look, take your time, of course, but know that James is devastated that he hurt you.”

“Right.” Sirius forces a breath through her suddenly constricted chest. “I know it’s not his fault, and I know I’m not being fair, but I just thought— I mean, everyone knows what I thought, which is fucking embarrassing.”

“If it helps, we all thought that.”

“ _Right_ ? God, _exactly._ Everyone thought so. Not to validate the gibbering masses or something, but it just makes sense.”

“Unfortunately, romantic feelings aren’t exactly a democracy.”

“Yeah, well.” Sirius shifts in her seat, stung at the loss of a perceived ally. “Well, I’m still prettier than _her_ at least, don’t you think?”

Remus always looks like he’s on the verge of falling asleep upright, but when he turns to Sirius, his eyes are sharp and knowing. “You should let this go,” he says. “But you won’t, will you?”

“Never been my strong suit.” Sirius checks her hair in a compact she lifted from a CVS in freshman year and has let sit in the bottom of her bag ever since. A piece of gum, still in the wrapper but soaked through with something sticky, comes off on her hand, and she sticks it to the underside of the table, ignoring Remus’ disdainful glance. “I know that people are supposed to have types or whatever, but objectively, I mean. She has so many freckles it looks like she’s come down with the world’s worst case of chicken pox.”

“I’m not going to badmouth Lily. She’s my friend too, and she’s having a really hard time after what happened with Snape.”

“What did happen, anyway?” Sirius leans in closer, intrigued, but before Remus can respond, Slughorn finally deigns to start the class, and Remus is too compulsively well-behaved to talk when he’s meant to be paying attention. He pointedly ignores the note that Sirius tries to pass him, eventually using his textbook as a barrier between them when she balls it up and throws it as him. Sirius considers tipping the book over onto his no doubt meticulous notes, but writes that strategy off as counter-productive after a few minutes of thought.

Finally, Slughorn tells them to split up and work on an assignment Sirius has missed the details of, and since the only AP class Peter qualified for was art and James is still determinedly and cheerfully making conversation with Lily’s back, Remus has no choice but to pay attention to her. He holds out as long as he can though, checking and rechecking his notes on their assignment even after Sirius knocks over the textbook between them with a thud that makes half the class turn and stare. Remus doesn’t look up until everyone has turned back to their own work, and when he does, he sighs dramatically, the kind of I’m-very-disappointed-in-you sigh that she feels she’s been getting a lot lately.

Sirius doesn’t say anything, and after nearly a minute of suspicious eye contact, Remus says, “Right, so I’m thinking—”

“I mean,” Sirius starts, struck anew by the injustice of it all, “she doesn’t even _like_ him, and I’m his best friend.”

“Can we do this later?” Remus puts her copy of the instructions in front of her and taps it pointedly. “Give me thirty minutes—no, twenty-five—of uninterrupted work, and then we can spend the rest of the period on James and Lily, okay? I’ll tell you everything you want to know, but I really need you to take out your textbook and do some work, for the sake of my college applications.” It’s a good deal, she knows, much better than she would have expected based on the last time they worked together, when Remus set up a calendar for them to follow and sent a snotty little email every time she missed a deadline, each one with James CC’d on it. She ought to take it and be grateful, but she doesn’t want to set a precedent by letting Remus order her around without complaint, so she glances pointedly at her bag, flat on the table beside her.

When Remus continues to look at her expectantly, she tips it out so that a half-empty bag of chips spills onto his notes along with some pencil shavings and a crusty mascara wand, then turns the lining inside out so he can see that there’s nothing else. “My textbook is in my locker. Probably. Or James’. Or at his house. The point is, budge over so we can share.”

They’ve been given two weeks for an assignment that Sirius realizes, once she’s skimmed the instructions, won’t take her longer than an hour of uninterrupted work, or, more realistically, a few brief spurts of productivity scheduled around emotional outbursts. Once the twenty-five minutes are up and they have a detailed outline, she snaps Remus’ textbook shut, cracking the spine on the notebook trapped inside. He only barely moves his fingers out of the way in time, and Sirius smiles sweetly when he glares at her.

“Okay, I did your thing, so now we’re doing mine. What’s going on with Evans? I know she and her slimy shadow are broken up, but I want to know _why.”_ Sirius begins to suspect that Remus didn’t think she would agree, or that she couldn’t follow through, because he doesn’t respond, his eyes casting around for an escape that isn’t going to come. “Hey, I held up my end. If you don’t want to talk shit, which for the record I would _infinitely_ prefer, then you have to at least gossip.” Sirius sighs, drumming her hands on the table as she continues, “Come _on_ , it’s not like I’m ever going to ask you to do this again; our classmates are, as a rule, of no interest to me, but I would kill for a distraction. I’m pretty fragile right now, in case you haven’t noticed.”

Remus has always been easy, softer than James and without the defensive barrier that comes near-constant exposure. His shoulders slump even further than usual, and she knows she’s won. “I know you’re faking, just for the record. But it isn’t exactly a secret, either. Well, you know that Lily is the junior leader of the GSA.” Sirius nods, not wanting to let on that the position is news to her and that, while she’s reasonably certain it’s a gay thing, she can’t for the life of her figure out what the acronym signifies. “I guess Snape was always a little weird about it, her being bisexual and all.” Sirius nods again, trying very hard not to look shocked. She knows better than to say in front of Remus that Lily doesn’t look gay, but she _doesn’t_ , with her endless stream of cardigans and high-waisted skirts in matching pastels. “She wanted to be patient, she said, give him time to get over it, since they grew up together and all. But they got in a fight a few weeks ago, and he called her a—” Remus stops, making a hand gesture that is associated with no word Sirius can think of, but it’s easy enough to figure out from context, leaving her feeling a bit guilty that she didn’t clear out of the bathroom when Lily asked. “And now they aren’t speaking. As you can imagine.”

“Damn.” She very badly does not want to feel sympathy for Lily, who not only has what she wants but doesn’t even have the good sense to appreciate it, but a small part of her softens anyway. It’s hard to ignore the parallels between them, and to then see that her problem is nothing in comparison, just a wounded ego and abandonment issues run amok. She says, not quite feeling it, “I guess I’m overreacting.” She’s hoping, despite herself, that Remus will respond with something along the lines of, “No, you aren’t; no one has ever suffered like you in this moment,” but instead he makes a noncommittal noise like he knows better than to agree but can’t find it in himself to disagree either. It was stupid, she knows, to go to him for the sort of validation she wants. In any other situation, that would be James’ job, and Remus would be floating along in their wake, murmuring, “Be reasonable,” which is Sirius’ least favorite advice to receive after, “Be patient with your parents; raising a teenager isn’t easy,” which she gets to hear twice a week, every week, during the mandatory counseling sessions she was assigned after what happened with Remus and Snape last year.

Remus spends what’s left of the period working and periodically asking Sirius to copy down relevant bits of information on the piece of loose leaf he tore out of his notebook for her, since her binder is (she hopes) wherever her textbook is. Once the bell rings, James, firmly shot down, trots back to Sirius looking more cheerful than anyone who spent the last hour striking out has any right to look. He hovers over her as she repacks her bag, stuffing all of the trash back inside with the thought that she’ll throw it out later, which is how she’s ended up carting it around in the first place. He’s waiting for her to ask, but there’s a limit to how gracious in defeat she can be, and they pretty much reached it when she didn’t buy a bus ticket and run off to another state the second he said no. Finally, he gives in and says, as if entirely unconscious of the minute they spent in fraught silence, “Lily said my hair looks like I stuck my finger in an electrical socket, which I think is a _lot_ less mean than when she told me that my glasses make me look like the scientist who dies first in a straight-to-DVD horror movie. I’m pretty sure I’m making progress.”

Sirius keeps staring down at her bag as if arranging a handful of items requires a significant amount of her brainpower, so that she won’t have to see how James’ face lights up when she congratulates him and sounds almost like she means it. James pats her on the back, a little harder than he would have two weeks ago, like he’s trying very hard to avoid even a whiff of anything past platonic. She hadn’t realized how much time James spent just inside of her personal bubble until he took a huge step out of it.

“I wanted to ask you something,” James says once she’s given up on the charade of packing her bag and allowed him to herd her, from a careful distance, out of the room. Instead of heading to their next class, clear on the other side of the school, James perches on a windowsill and pats the spot next to him, effectively guaranteeing that they’re going to be at least ten minutes late. Sirius sits, feeling sure as she does that it’s the wrong choice, that she ought to claim an uncharacteristic sense of academic duty and make a run for it. “One of the guys on the team, Frank, has been asking me for your number for ages. He’s funny, nice without being _too_ nice. I think you’d get along. What do you think?”

Sirius opens her mouth and then closes it, feeling as she does a sense of finality, like she might never bother to speak again. James doesn’t seem to notice her silence, as if the question was really just a way to build up to his monologue. “I realized. Well, I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching since, you know. Since a couple weeks ago. I really was blindsided, like I said, but I’ve realized that, well, not that you need the ego boost, but a _lot_ of my guy friends have asked me to set them up with you, and I always said no without even asking you, and I thought it was because I just knew you _that_ well. I felt, actually, very chivalrous about it, like I was saving you all this time and effort with these sub-par guys. But I think really that I was jealous.” Sirius’s heart gives the slightest hopeful leap, and James must be able to see something of it in her face, because he hurries to clarify, “It isn’t that I wanted to date you, exactly. Really, it’s just—well, if I call you now, you’ll pick up, right, and there’s no one who could call that would make you hang up on me. I didn’t want to lose that, and I still don’t, but I’ve realized it isn’t fair for me to take choices away from you. So if you want, I can give him your number.”

Sirius shakes her head to clear it, feeling that everything after “jealous” was spoken from the other end of a long tube, or by a rippling figure above the water as she sank below. She digs her fingernails into the palm of her hand, hoping the shock will make her focus. “What about. Which was it, Fabian? With the hot air balloons? Isn’t that like, the whole point of claiming prom dates? To stop people like Frank from trying to jump the line?”

“That’s Gideon, and it wasn’t hot air balloons; he named a bunch of stars after you and there was going to be a whole thing at the planetarium. But I guess his mom noticed her credit card was missing, so he’s grounded for the rest of the year. Frank said he wants to get to know you a bit more first. I mean, there are still months until prom.”

“Right.” Sirius considers this information with an attention it probably doesn’t merit just to buy herself more time. “Does Gideon realize that I’m already named after a star?”

“I think that’s why he did it, but I might be giving him too much credit.” James laughs, loud and easy, and Sirius suddenly sees a path back to normalcy. If she says yes to a date with Frank, then James will know that she’s at least _trying_ to get over it, and that will go a long way toward fixing what’s broken, what _she’s_ broken. If she can’t have what she wants, something she ought to be familiar with by now, then she can at least keep herself from ruining what she does have.

“Fine. Frank and I can grab coffee or something. But we aren’t in middle school anymore; tell him to grow a pair and ask me himself, and we’ll go from there.”

“That’s awesome.” James checks his watch and says, as if the totally empty halls weren’t a dead giveaway, “Oh my God, we’re late. We need to go!” He grabs Sirius by the arm, apparently no longer feeling that she and her emotions are radioactive, and drags her toward the stairs, extolling as he goes Frank’s many good qualities, which apparently include his own car, a wicked trick shot that’s won their team four games in a row, and all of The Hangover films on Blu-ray. Sirius nods along, trying to remember which of James’ teammates Frank actually is. By the time they get to class, she’s given up and resolved to check Facebook at the first opportunity. The whole thing would be a mistake, she thinks, except for the way James smiles at her as they get scolded for being late, like they’re co-conspirators once again.


	3. i want to drown myself in a bottle of her perfume

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings for mentions of alcoholism, parental abuse, homophobia internalized and otherwise

At first, Sirius chalks her ongoing obsession with Lily up to residual jealousy; she and James are back to normal, but it still stings a bit when he mentions Lily’s expressive eyes or her dewy skin. But Sirius realizes fairly quickly that she’s not trying to come out on top, that she’s no longer comparing their GPAs or fixating on the fact that she has at _least_ a cup size on Lily. Instead she’s just looking, and when James sighs dreamily and says that Lily’s hair looks like spun silk, there’s a little part of her that wants to sigh along. She always catches herself just in time and turns it into something a little closer to exasperated than awestruck.

She barely remembers what she was like before James came along; her childhood feels like a story being told to her by someone else. She and James are in contact practically every second of every day, not counting the eight hours that he spends asleep and she spends, mostly, leaning halfway out her bedroom window chainsmoking cheap menthols. It’s only natural, at least in Sirius’ estimation of “natural,” that some of James’ interests rub off on her. She spent hours when they first met learning everything she could about soccer, and not three weeks ago she sat down and memorized every line of Drake’s newest album. She’s always thought of it like outsourcing: if James can’t get something from her, he’ll go somewhere else, and since she already has about a dozen strikes against her, she ought to try to keep up. The flutters of interest that reliably follow his deeper infatuations have always seemed to come from the same impulse, a strategic failure of her subconscious.

But the impulse to catch Lily’s eye doesn’t fade like it should. Ordinarily, she spends about a week feeling off-balance while James talks up some other girl, and then she hunts down whichever guy most recently asked her out and gets the whole thing out of her system. But this time she can’t even pick a guy with a shot at interesting her, because she’s been blowing off Frank Longbottom, the human embodiment of beige paint drying, for the last two weeks, and James is starting to lose patience with her disinterest in his matchmaking. Frank probably is too, but he’s too much of a gentleman to say so, and she doesn’t particularly care either. He’s just a means to an end, a way to prove that she isn’t going to throw another tantrum, and he should probably just focus on feeling lucky she’s giving him the time of day.

She reaches her limit when Lily makes a stupid joke in class and she has to choke down a laugh. It’s obvious enough that James points it out, says under his breath, “See? Do you get it now, what I see in her?” To which the answer is a painfully obvious yes, so she pulls out her phone under the desk and texts Frank the intersection closest to her house and instructions to pick her up at eight.

Frank Longbottom is easily _the_ most boring person Sirius has ever met, the third in a series of strikes against him that also includes the fact that he’s a solid two inches shorter than her and has his hair swooped over his forehead in a failed attempt to cover a smattering of acne. But after two weeks of claiming debilitating cramps, she doesn’t want to be overly cruel, so she spends almost an hour trying to construct an outfit that says, “Let’s not do this again,” without being insultingly half-assed. It’s the kind of thing that would be more fun with someone to talk to, but James would get red-faced about all of the changing involved, and only ever wears basketball shorts anyway. She’s never particularly gotten along with other girls, or at least likes to think of herself that way, rather than conceding that she doesn’t get along with much of anyone and just so happened to luck into a tightknit and coincidentally all-male social circle.

She considers, as she tugs off a slinky black dress that she vaguely remembers lifting from a department store, the possibility that her current fixation is coming from that lack. It’s a satisfying explanation, less damning than being gay, less pathetic than letting her obsession with James tie her up in knots. She’s never been into girly things, or, as a general rule, people, but she figures there must be a reason that girls tend to stick together, other than wanting someone to go to the bathroom with. Maybe it’s just that her subconscious knows something she doesn’t about the natural order of things, like how she only knows her period is coming because she goes practically feral. She’s been caught more than once in front of the fridge, its light spilling over the kitchen tiles, with a rare steak in her hands. James, who flirted briefly with the idea of medical school, says it’s because she’s anemic. It could be something like that, something livable.

She settles on leggings and a low-cut sweater, which score a fair number of points for being the only items of clothing in her entire room that are definitely clean instead of on the verge. She adds some earrings, forcing them through her partially-healed holes, pulls on her motorcycle boots, and is out the door within a minute of Frank’s text. She snaps a selfie on the way to his car, her face screwed up in a joke-y grimace, and texts it to James. He responds just as she’s sliding into the passenger seat, which works perfectly because she’s smiling at him saying she looks nice right as Frank hands her a flower, so that she forgets to ask what exactly he thinks she’s supposed to do with a single wilted carnation.

Frank drives a minivan, and not even one of the passably sleek ones released this millennium. It’s very mid-90s soccer mom, a vibe that isn’t helped by the fact that he stays in his parking spot, staring at her pointedly, until she clicks her seatbelt into its lock.

“I’m really glad we could finally do this,” he says once she’s buckled in. Sirius has never considered herself particularly soft, but James has kept up a barrage of Frank Longbottom fun facts for two weeks straight, so he’s become annoyingly fleshed out, someone she’ll feel bad hurting. But she still can’t get what’s supposed to make them so compatible. Frank spends his weekends babysitting his younger cousins out of the kindness of his heart, and she spends hers sacked out on James’ couch playing whatever violent videogame is on tap and warding off his attempts to talk to her about college tours. As far as she can tell, the only thing she and Frank have in common is that they both think she’s pretty.

Sirius grunts in a way she hopes sounds passably enthusiastic, but she must not be very successful because Frank grimaces and tightens his hands on the wheel. He drives like an old woman in a rainstorm, perpetually ten miles below the speed limit and with his blinkers on a block before every turn. It would be annoying in the best of circumstances, but considering how desperately she wants to jump out the window, the added minutes are agonizing. “So!” she says, loud and drawn-out, hoping she’ll figure out what she wants to say by the time she’s done. It doesn’t work, and she’s grateful that Frank seems to be terrified to take his eyes off the road for even a second, allowing her to fumble her way through this interaction in relative private. Finally she lands on, and immediately regrets, “You’re on the team with James?”

“Um, yeah,” Frank grits out, squinting ahead like they’re on some backwoods dirt path instead of a city street with lights on either side of them. “But my real passion is tennis.”

Sirius lets out a groan, visceral and deeply audible. Frank jumps in his seat, and then hunches even further over the wheel, his fingers tight on the pleather as if to make up for that millisecond of inattention. Sirius rolls her eyes but tries to sound something other than relentlessly irritable when she apologizes.  “Sorry, I don’t know why I asked you that. I get enough sports talk from James. Tell me something else about yourself. Literally anything else.”

Frank chuckles a bit nervously, the same sort of uncomfortable energy he’s had every time they’ve talked for more than the thirty seconds afforded by running into each other between classes. She wonders if James has told him the same thing he told her, the line about acquired tastes, or if he’s really just that desperate to date out of his league. “I’ll try to come up with something interesting, but I should really concentrate on the road right now, okay?”

“Okay,” Sirius says, feeling rather annoyingly like a scolded child. They don’t talk again until they’re at the café he picked, when Sirius finds out that he thinks a list of all the Scout badges he has qualifies as interesting.

She spends the date thinking about James, which is fine, since he’s the one she’s going to murder for setting this whole trainwreck in motion, and about Lily, which isn’t. As Frank tells her about how much he loves to bake—successfully bringing the whole issue to the forefront of her mind because she can _not_ think of a gayer hobby for him to have—she’s keeping a running tally of all the French words he’s mangled so far, including the name of the café, the name of his drink _and_ his meal, and the phrase “mise en place.” That leads, rather naturally she thinks, to considering how Lily has the best accent in their class even though Sirius is the one who had a French tutor from the age of three until her parents got sick on spending money on her, and then she’s too far down the rabbithole to turn back.

After what feels to Sirius like hours of smiling and nodding and using her fork to carve curse words into her massive, Americanized crepe, Frank asks, “This isn’t going very well, is it?”

“No,” Sirius says, a bit more emphatically than she means to. She tries and fails to soften it with a little smile. “I guess I’ll tell James to cross ‘matchmaker’ off his list of potential careers. He actually has one, you know. It’s three pages long.”

Frank forces a laugh. “You could have just told me, you know. It’s fine that you have feelings for James, but you should have said something before we went out.”

“I don’t have feelings for James,” she snaps, then rocks back in her seat, struck by how true it feels. She repeats it. Frank doesn’t seem convinced, but it’s hard to think of anything that matters less than his opinion.

“Right,” Frank says, flat and disbelieving. All of the snippy comments Sirius has been swallowing come bubbling up, but she bites her tongue, hard. “Let’s just get out of here.”

It seems rude to have a disastrous date with a guy and then ask him to drop her at another guy’s house, an insult to injury sort of thing, so Sirius just programs James’ address into Frank’s GPS while he isn’t paying attention, and jumps out before he can point out that they’re nowhere near her neighborhood.

Sirius has had her own key to James’ house practically since they met, so she lets herself in and stomps upstairs. James’ bedroom door is open because, as he’s said to her many times, his family doesn’t hide things from each other. More practically though, it’s because the only occupied bedrooms on the entire floor are his and the guest room that Mrs. Potter shoos Sirius to when she stays over past midnight.

Sirius throws herself onto James’ bed, sprawling out so that he ends up huddled in one corner, and says as a greeting, “You know when Peter is kissing your ass so hard it ought to be some niche porn? And it’s great for you because you’re desperate to have your ego stroked, but for me and Remus it’s the most mind-numbing thing in the world?”

James smiles at her, nudging one of her arms down toward her side so that he has a bit more space. “I wouldn’t characterize it that way, but sure.”

“Well, that’s a fucking walk in the park compared to—” Sirius checks her phone for the time, and feels vaguely like she’s having a heart attack. “Holy shit, only an _hour_ with Frank Longbottom?”

James scoffs. “I’m sure it wasn’t _that_ bad.”

“I seriously considered starting a fire in a bathroom trashcan so I could escape.” She waits until James is done laughing at her. “That isn’t a joke. It would have been _so_ worth it, James, you can’t even begin to understand. But it’s fine, I made it through, and you owe me about a million drinks. I don’t even want to be able to _say_ the name Frank at the end of the night.”

She debriefs James with as many damning details as possible, like how Frank slicked his hair back with something really pungent and sticky, or how he tried to order for her like his dad always does for his mom. The more she talks, each complaint punctuated by a large gulp from a can of beer from the pack under the bed, the more irritated James seems. Eventually he cuts her off, just as she’s about to go into how sweaty Frank’s hand was on hers. “Fine, I get it. Sorry for thinking you might like to spend time with a nice guy instead of the douchebags you usually date.”

Sirius cocks her head, considering. She isn’t even close to tipsy yet, but she can feel already the familiar blunting of her sharp edges, the slowing of her thoughts. “Are they douchebags?” None of her boyfriends, such as they were, have made enough of an impression for her to notice a pattern.

 “Sirius, after you dumped McLaggen, he told all the guys on the team—” James turns red and seems to puff up three sizes. “Well, he said a lot of stuff he shouldn’t have said, and I never told you because I didn’t want you to be hurt.”

Sirius gives this revelation the amount of thought McLaggen seems to merit, which is very little, and then shrugs. “I broke up with him for a reason, I guess.”

“I guess. But you can see why I was hoping you’d pick someone better this time.”

Sirius rolls her eyes. “I can take care of myself, James, and I could have taken care of McLaggen, too, if you’d given me the choice. Anyway, he wasn’t my _boyfriend_. We went out a couple times, that’s it. Not everyone has your instinct for compulsive nesting.”  She finishes her second beer and starts on a third. James winces, but keeps quiet, at least on that point. “You should ask for a minifridge so we don’t have to drink this shit warm.”

“Right. Look, I promise not to set you up again, but it’s not wrong of me to think you deserve better. It’s not _overbearing_ to want you to be happy.”

“I am happy,” Sirius says, able to hear without any input from James how deeply unconvincing it is. She adds, “I mean, enough.”

“Right,” James says. “We don’t have to talk about it now, but we should, eventually.”

“God, I prefer listening to you gush about Evans’ perfect seashell ears. Fuck the psychoanalysis, seriously.” She grabs a can and sets it down on the bedspread, letting it roll toward him. “Now catch up or shut up.” James finishes his open can in one swallow and pops the new one open. Sirius watches him carefully until she’s sure he isn’t going to try another heart-to-heart. Instead, he starts up a much more palatable stream of chatter about some new videogame. The dull buzz, combined with the lazy rotation of his ceiling fan, has a vaguely hypnotic effect, and she lies back, relishing the stillness of her brain.

“Is it because she’s into girls?” Sirius asks, hearing her voice like it’s coming from somewhere outside of her body. “Lily, I mean. Like, is that what does it for you?”

“No, oh my God!” James, who has always been something of a lightweight, takes a second to roll over and face her on the plush mattress, doing a passable imitation of someone caught in quicksand. “That’s not it at all. I just think she’s nice.”

“Hm. Does it like, change anything? Would you prefer if she weren’t?” She tries very hard not to think about why James’ answer feels so important.

“Of course not. It doesn’t have anything to do with her sexuality either way.” It seems to be taking a good deal of effort for James to keep his gaze steady on her. “Why are you asking me all of this? Is it about Regulus?”

Sirius props herself up on James’ pillow so that she can take a drink. “Why would it be about Regulus?”

“Are you joking? I probably shouldn’t tell you this if you don’t already know, but Sirius, your brother is gay.” James delivers this news gently, his hand hovering over hers, like she might start yelling and need to be talked down. Instead, she laughs. Regulus is a compulsive rule-follower, terrified of defying their parents, and while she knows it isn’t a choice—she’s gotten the ”oh my God it’s _2017_ ” talk more than once already—it just seems too incongruous to accept.

“What are you talking about? Regulus isn’t gay.”

“Regulus is _super_ gay. Like, he has a massive crush on me and has for years. Don’t tell him I know.” James stares at her like she’s a stranger. “How do you _not_?”

Sirius thinks this over, considering as many of James and Regulus’ interactions as she can recall through the slight haze that’s settled over her, and has to concede that it makes sense, which in turn makes her feel like a terrible sister. She says, a bit defensive, “We don’t talk about our feelings.”

“Why not?”

“Because not everyone sprung fully-formed out of a Disney Channel Original Movie about the importance of friendship and being true to yourself, James. Anyway, it’s depressing. Like, what’s he supposed to say, ‘How was your day? Mine sucked because our stupid parents are monsters, and oh yeah, I’m gay and if they ever find out they’re gonna kill me’? What’s the point?”

“The point is making sure your little brother knows he can talk to you.” James straightens, squaring his shoulders the way he always does in preparation for being sanctimonious. “Think about it, he’s probably having a really tough time since your parents aren’t exactly—accepting, and he doesn’t have a ton of friends. I think you should reach out to him.”

“And say what, it’s cool if you’re into dicks?”

“You could say that. Or you could say, you know, that it’s all right and that nothing could change how much you love and care about him.” James pauses, looking at her carefully. “Which is how you should feel.”

She doesn’t know what she’s going to do until it’s too late to stop it, a state of affairs that is a good deal more common than she’d like, so that she’s already spat out, “I’m a lesbian,” before she can think about it, adds, “I’m like, 85% sure,” in the silence that follows. She’s been getting each new drink by just groping around on the floor until her hand touches a cool metal can, but now she turns away, head down, so she won’t have to see James’ reaction. It would be nice if she were the kind of person to come out after a lot of thought when she feels safe, but really she just has her hackles up at the condescension of it all. It’s true that when they first met, she needed James to periodically tell her what was and wasn’t normal in the world outside of Grimmauld, but she’s _basically_ an adult now, and if she fucks up, she would like it to just reflect negatively on her as a person like it does with everyone else, and not be another thing he chalks up to her sad, isolated childhood.

“Sirius,” he says, really soft, the kind of voice someone might use on a scared puppy or a kid that’s gotten its head stuck between the bars of a railing. Most of her is halfway off the bed now, groping for the mostly-gone pack that’s somehow gotten itself wedged underneath his mahogany bedframe, so he puts a hand on her ankle. “First of all, it’s so important to me that you know that you’re my best friend, and nothing is going to change that. But Sirius…” He pauses, and she hauls herself back up, a little impressed by her athleticism when she’s so profoundly under the influence. James ruffles his hair, not the way he does with Lily, like girls are just desperate for guys who look like they’ve never seen a comb, but a little more thoughtlessly, signifying genuine discomfort. “Last month you were mad at me because I turned you down for prom. No offense, but you’re not a lesbian.”

He sounds so confident, like there’s no question that he knows her better than she knows herself, which is made a good deal more infuriating by the fact that every other time he’s used that tone with her, he’s been right. “Yeah, well, this isn’t gonna be the last time a girl says you turned her off men, so you might as well get used to it.”

James squints at her, contemplative, but before he can say anything, he goes into a hiccupping fit that transforms, very slowly, into laughter. “You’re such an asshole,” he says once he has himself under control, and then chuckles again. “It’s really unbelievable.”

“You’re the one who shut me down when I tried to come out.” Sirius pauses, feeling sure that this sounds too earnest for what she was actually doing, which was winning an argument that only exists in her head. “Or whatever.”

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry. But what does that make me then?”

Sirius thinks this over, chewing on the inside of her cheek and wishing she were a person powered by something other than impulse and spite. She doesn’t want to say that she thinks James was a multiyear fluke, which makes her sound stupid, or a way to lock down the only path to happiness she saw, which makes her sound either very manipulative or very pathetic. “Maybe like—I mean, every rule has an exception, right?”

James winces. “I think that’s probably offensive to say.”

Sirius twists the tab off of her can, catching her thumb on a piece of jagged metal. She stares at the red beading up on her skin, feeling unjustifiably surprised, until James reaches over and tosses a tissue over her hand, patting it haphazardly. She flicks it off and sticks her thumb in her mouth, saying around it, “No one asked you, straight man.”

“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” James says slowly. His eyes are trained somewhere above Sirius’ head, and she tries to remember which direction, left or right, means he’s a liar. “I’m just surprised. This is kind of out of nowhere.”

“Yeah, well,” Sirius says, voice still garbled. There isn’t much blood, but her mouth fills with the taste of copper.

“And you can be a bit impulsive,” James continues, like he’s trying to make sense of it for himself, not for her. “I’m just wondering if you’ve totally thought this through.”

“Of course I have!” Sirius snaps. “I don’t tell you _everything_ , James; just because this is coming out of nowhere for you, doesn’t mean it is for me.” She’s pleased by how convincingly this comes out, like James really hasn’t divined exactly what’s happening. “So try not to be such a patronizing dick for once in your life, all right?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be, uh, invalidating. I was just surprised.” James takes a long drink, and she wants to tell him to remember this moment, this feeling, what it’s like to need to drown his feelings just to be able to speak. “Did you think you couldn’t tell me? Did I do something to make you uncomfortable?”

Sirius snorts. “Well, it’s not like you’re taking it so well right _now_.”

“But that’s different.”

“Not really!” She doesn’t often have the upper hand with James; it’s easy enough to get him to back off, but being the one who’s willing to burn everything down around her doesn’t make her the one who’s right. But now she is, almost entirely, even if she is fudging the timeline a bit. “You’re not my father, James, and you’re not my fucking therapist. If I’m wrong then I’m wrong, and that’ll probably be pretty embarrassing. But I don’t need you to treat me like some idiot kid who has to be walked through all the ramifications of her decisions. Say it’s fine, okay, say it doesn’t change anything, and then shut the fuck up about it.”

James stares at her, and she stares back, as close to unflinching as she can get. Alcohol makes her soft, and then cold, and then blindingly angry. Four drinks in, she’s still fuzzily happy, and therefore fragile. She can’t understand how James walks around like this every day, open to other people and their many vagaries. “Okay,” he says, and she lets herself breathe again. “I didn’t mean to be condescending. I just care about you, a lot, and maybe I overdo it sometimes. But _of course_ this doesn’t change anything, and I’m sorry.”

She would never let James hug her for longer than three seconds while sober, invariably worming away and backing up her physical retreat with a verbal one. But she’s drunk enough now to lean into his embrace without bothering to say something rude, to let vulnerability stand on its own. It feels unnatural, like she’s dressed herself in clothes two sizes too small, but she finds herself unable to let go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think James is bi, personally, but I also think his intense friendship with Sirius is probably the impetus for him figuring it out in his adolescence so with rule 63 Sirius it comes later.
> 
> This fic keeps growing and I'm now reasonably sure it's going to be 6 or 7 chapters but I've already changed the count too many times and I'm going to be embarrassed if I'm wrong again. I should know for sure by the time I post chapter 4. There should also be outtakes! This fic was supposed to be an exercise in not overthinking things but instead it has taught me that I should never trust my instincts ever again bc I'll end up with thousands of words of unnecessary scenes.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> big warning for internalized homophobia and general references to abuse!!
> 
> i guess this chapter requires the context that for whatever reason i have always maintained the ride-or-die conviction that sirius is deeply regressive and lily is a strident (high school) feminist. also sirius is a very sloppy communicator but it's important to me to clarify that she's a lesbian

Sirius bounces a tennis ball against the wall that separates her room from Regulus’ until he yells for her to stop, and then a few more times for good measure. Just as the ball is smacking into her palm on the sixth rebound, he appears in her doorway, slump-shouldered and irritable. “You could just say you want to talk to me, you know, instead of trying to trick me into coming over here.”

Sirius throws the ball a few more times to make a point. James stole it from a hopper in the gym and acted like he had lifted the Mona Lisa from the Louvre for weeks on end, until Sirius took it from his bag just to put an end to the bragging. She'd planned to throw it away, but instead she still has it, two years later.  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but you might as well sit down. Since you’re here anyway.”

Regulus sighs and slumps into her desk chair. “What’s going on?”

“So like,” Sirius starts, and stops because she sounds nervous. She throws the ball a couple more times, hard enough that paint flakes off the ceiling and falls into a mug of ice-cold coffee. Regulus wrinkles his nose and slides the mug away from the edge of the desk. Something about this gesture, the familiar fussiness of it, soothes her, reminds her that it’s just Regulus. “If we’re both gay, does that prove it’s something about how you’re raised? Or does that make it biological? I mean, Mom and Dad _are_ cousins, right?”

Regulus goes very still. He’s never been a good liar, which is one of many reasons he doesn’t do so well in their family. She can tell just from the way he’s holding himself, prey that’s caught the scent of something stronger and faster, that James was right. “I’m _not_ gay!” he says, strangled and unconvincing. He slumps before he’s even all the way through the denial, like he knows she isn't going to buy it. After a few seconds of silence, he whispers, “How did you know?”

If she’s honest, if she says she knows because James does, then they won’t be able to talk about anything past how it isn’t true, and he’s completely mortified by this misunderstanding, and he should probably just quit the team. And she needs to have a real conversation, rather desperately, so she says, “Call it sisterly intuition.” But that sounds too sappy, and she corrects herself, “Gaydar.”

Regulus seems to find both answers roughly the same degree of discomfiting. But he takes a breath, and then another, the slow, measured count of about a thousand anxiety self-help sites. “Isn’t it your lifelong aspiration to live out a gritty reboot of _The Notebook_ with James Potter?”

“It’s called bisexuality, Regulus. Join this _millennium_ , oh my God.” Sirius throws the ball with more force and less aim than she means to and very nearly shatters her window. Regulus scoops it up when it rolls by his feet and, ignoring her outstretched hand, stows it in a drawer otherwise populated by an illegal firework, a ball of dirty socks, and a pen slowly leaking ink into the wood underneath. “Anyway.” If anyone can understand, it’s Regulus, but she’s not sure what to say or how to say it. Without being asked, Regulus stares obligingly out her window, knowing that this isn’t a conversation they can have face-to-face, and she’s struck by an overwhelming wave of tenderness. She wishes she were the kind of sister James wants her to be, someone who wouldn’t have needed to be told that Regulus was struggling. “James isn’t like us,” she manages. “And I liked that. I wanted to keep it.” Regulus makes a noise that sounds like affirmation. “I thought—” She misses the tennis ball sorely, craving something to do with her hands other than fidgeting or yanking her hair out one strand at a time. “Well, people lose touch with their high school friends all the time, without even meaning to. And James and I don’t have all that much in common, really, except that we're both here, now. I thought, well, if we were _dating_ , that would be different, I wouldn’t just be his crazy friend then, and it wouldn’t matter that we don't want the same things. And maybe I thought I could start to want them, if I got close enough.” It sounds worse out loud. It's just as pathetic as it was in her head, but now, airing her greatest wish in front of someone else, she can hear the holes in her logic, can hear that it only made sense because she needed it to.

Regulus doesn't look at her, and she can't decide whether she wants him to. She didn't cry easily when they were younger, while he seemed then and seems now to exist constantly on the verge of tears, so she's never been vulnerable in front of him quite like this. She was always the stronger one, the one with a plan, even if it was as stupid as packing a change of clothes and a sandwich each and running away to the park by their house. There's something damning about this admission, a shift in their dynamic that she can never take back.

Regulus turns toward her. She expected contempt, hoped for sympathy, but what she gets looks more like confusion. “And that seemed good to you? Marrying Potter and eventually popping out a bunch of hyperactive, elephant-eared brats? You figured that was the future for you?”

This seems unfair, considering that Regulus' plan for improving his circumstances has thus far been limited to doing exactly what their parents want, exactly when they want it, and otherwise pretending not to exist. He can't argue that she has been any _less_ effective in crafting a life worth living.  “Well, it seemed better than what I'd had going for me before, and it’s sure better than what I’ve got now. I have no idea what I’m doing, or what this is supposed to mean. So, yeah, I preferred it.” Regulus droops, which is a hard thing to quantify when his ordinary posture has his ears about level with his shoulders. Sirius squints at him and eventually concludes that he does look even more defeated than usual. It seems unfair, since they’re meant to be talking about her problems right now. “ _What_?” she snaps.

“Nothing.” Regulus sighs, staring down at the pitted surface of her desk. “I was just hoping for something a little more optimistic, I guess.”

Sirius flops back against her pillow, narrowly avoiding a bruise from her headboard. _Optimistic_ is not a word anyone has ever applied to her, but she still feels like she’s failed, let Regulus down. She retreats into resentment, which has never failed her before. “Oh, so it’s my job to figure it out for the both of us?”

“That’s not what I _said_. But you’re the rebellious one, you’re the one with the exit strategy. If you can’t make it work…” Regulus sighs, which is barely worth noting since nearly all of his breaths come out as life-worn sighs. “If you can’t make it work, what the hell am I supposed to do?”

All of Sirius feels cold. “That isn’t fair.”

“To be cliché, Sirius, life isn’t fair. You and I both already know that. You’re not responsible for me, but I guess I thought.” He shakes his head. “Forget it. You’re right. It’s not your job to fix this for me.”

Sirius was the protector when they were little, or at least thought of herself that way. She would like to be able to try on that role again, to say and say convincingly that it’s going to be all right, or at least not as bad as he thinks, but she isn’t that much better at lying than he is, and the only thing worse than saying nothing is saying something they both know to be false. “James’ parents would let you stay with them too, if you wanted.”

Regulus snorts. “That’s not the point, Sirius. That doesn’t _fix_ it.”

“No shit.” Sirius rolls her eyes as dramatically as she knows how, but Regulus has returned to not looking at her. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“I don’t know either.”

They stew in that defeat for a while, neither wanting to concede that this is the best they can do. Finally, Regulus yawns unconvincingly, his arms stretched above his head. "Well. I have a lot of homework to get done tonight, and I need to prep for a make-up test. This has been great, but—”

“You could do that stuff in here.” Regulus raises an eyebrow, and Sirius reaches for something that will make the offer more appealing. “I still have all my notes from last year.” The eyebrow goes even higher. “Photocopies of James and Remus’ notes, whatever. They are technically mine, in that they’re here.” She opens her nightstand drawer, but there’s nothing in it a textbook she should have returned two years ago and a tilting pile of gum wrappers. “Somewhere. We don’t have to talk about it, either. I just don’t think either of us really wants to be alone right now.”

Regulus nods, just barely, more like he’s thinking to himself than responding to something she’s said. When he comes back with three massive textbooks in tow, he smirks at her. “Who’s the soft one now?”

“Fuck off,” Sirius grumbles affectionately, kicking at the tangled ball of her sheets to make room for Regulus to sit. He does after a moment’s hesitation, as if she might suddenly change her mind and banish him.

 

 

 

Sirius makes a point of keeping Remus or Peter with her at all times so that James can’t do any of the things that now taint their relationship, like interrogating her about past boyfriends or trying to draw her into conversations about hot girls with a weirdly challenging air. Despite her careful maneuvering, he manages to corner her in the third-floor stairwell when she declines to accompany Peter to his locker to retrieve his gym uniform. “ _Finally_ ,” James says, slinging an arm around her shoulders. The sheaf of printer paper he’s holding nearly hits her in the face. “I feel like it’s never just us anymore.” This doesn’t seem to merit a response, which is fortunate because he doesn’t leave space for one. “I was up last night doing some reading about like.” He lowers his voice. “Coming out, and identity, and like, compulsory heterosexuality. No, heteronormativity.” He pauses to think. Sirius is pretty sure she’s going to hyperventilate. “Compulsory heterosexuality. Definitely. The article on page twenty-two is especially relevant I thought.” James switches the papers to the arm that doesn’t have a stranglehold around her neck so that he can pass them to her easily. She accepts because she can’t think of anything else to do, folding the stack in half to cover a greyscale graphic of a rainbow flag.

With James’ arm around her shoulder, his sunny smile in her face, and his neatly-stapled stack of research clutched in her hand, she’s distracted enough that she forgets to skip gym entirely. Class opens with ten minutes of laps, which Sirius walks. James is showing off, as usual, running faster than everyone else and occasionally backwards. He waves at Sirius every time he laps her, though he’s given up on getting her to run. She waves back, grateful that at least something hasn’t changed between them.

Afterward, they’re split into pairs, and when Sirius’ name is called right after Lily’s, both girls groan, while James looks ready to die of jealousy. Sirius is content to hang back, still scanning the gym for an exit strategy, however implausible, but Lily approaches the second they’re told to find their partners, glaring down at Sirius. “If you don’t hurry up, we’re going to get stuck with the broken racquets.”

“Oh nooo,” Sirius drones. “That would totally ruin my favorite sport.” She makes Lily wait another thirty seconds before getting up and trailing her to the front of the room, where they’re handed two racquets that have indeed seen better days, and a birdie with a hole in its plastic netting big enough for Sirius to squeeze two fingers through. She does so, and Lily rolls her eyes.

“There’s a funding crisis in the public education system, you know. You shouldn’t be damaging school property.” Sirius makes a face and mouths the words _funding crisis_ to herself. “I saw that.” Lily looks around for teachers within earshot and then says, quieter, “ _asshole_ ,” managing such vitriol that the insult barely weakened at all by her hesitation. She picks up the folding mat that will serve as their net and tilts it toward Sirius, letting go so that she has to catch it or be hit in the chest. She puts her hands up at the last second, and is annoyed with herself for doing so, feeling that it would have been a more principled stance to allow herself to be struck. It might even have allowed her to feign an injury.

Lily puts her racquet down to help Sirius set up the mat when they reach their assigned spot, but it’s off-balance, one corner ripped and haphazardly taped back together so that it tilts to the side and flops over the second they both let go. Lily sighs and glares at Sirius in a way she presumes means _See the value of punctuality?_ Even in the same gym shorts and tee everyone else (bar Sirius) is wearing, trying and failing to wrestle a decade-old mat into a standing position, Lily looks put together, somehow, like she just has some impervious above-it-all armor. She looks like the kind of daughter Sirius’ parents would have wanted, except then she turns, her ponytail flaring out behind her, and snaps, “It wouldn’t kill you to make an effort, you know.”

“Whatever.” Sirius pulls out her phone even though Regulus reliably shuts his off until three, and talking to James isn’t quite the refuge it used to be. Her last notification is James turning the default emoji in their Facebook chat to the rainbow. She sets it to the gun and then slips her phone into her back pocket.

“I hope you don’t think you’re going to use this time to put in a good word for Potter.” Lily takes a step back to examine their handiwork. The mat stays upright for almost thirty seconds after both she and Sirius have let go, which is a new record. “If he were the last person on Earth, I would gladly go mad from isolation rather than exchange even the blandest of pleasantries with him.”

“Harsh.” Sirius raises an eyebrow. ”But no, I don’t really give a shit about any of that. He can strike out just fine on his own.”

“Good, because I‘ve reached my limit on both the pickup artist tricks and the wistful staring.” Lily glares down at the mat, which has flopped over again despite her careful attention. “This is ridiculous. We’ll be lucky if we get one game in at this rate.” Sirius doesn’t bother with a sarcastic reply this time, feeling that her disdain is too obvious to need to be verbalized.

They finally manage to get the mat to stand with only a slight lean, Lily looking more pleased than the situation seems to merit. Her first serve is a competitive one, fast and hard toward the back corner of the rectangle that makes up their court. Sirius just barely gets her racquet up in time for the birdie to fly by her. She scoops it up and tosses it back.

“Are you genuinely this bad, or are you being lazy?” Lily serves the birdie more gently this time, and it lands with a plop next to Sirius’ right foot.

“Little of both.” Sirius tries to serve, finally managing on her third attempt. Its wobbly flight path falters just after crossing the boundary, and Lily just barely catches it on the edge of her racquet.

She doesn’t bother to send it back, bouncing it up and down a couple times before snatching it out of the air. “This has officially crossed the line from funny to hard to watch.”

“Maybe you and James _would_ make a good couple.” Sirius nods to the court where James is clearly at the tail-end of a makeshift touchdown dance. “Not many people can manage any degree of passion about badminton.”

Lily snorts. “That’s one of the more hurtful things anyone has ever said to me. And I was _just_ thinking about going easy on you.” Sirius’ competitive nature is ordinarily dulled by what she has always seen as the pointlessness of athletics, but Lily, it seems, brings out the worst in her. When Lily serves, again like she’s playing to win, Sirius lunges forward, and the birdie hits her in the face. It bounces off of her eyebrow, but the hand instinctually clapped to her eye gives her an idea. She keeps it in place and lets out a theatrical moan. Lily drops her racquet and runs over, apologizing profusely. Sirius has staged a few too many gym jailbreaks to be taken seriously, but Lily’s sincere panic helps sell it, and they’re quickly excused to go to the nurse’s office.

Sirius drops her hand as soon as they’re out of sight of any teachers. “I guess being a total suck-up has its benefits.”

Lily takes a second to process, but then she turns red and draws herself up to her full height. It would be almost intimidating if Sirius hadn’t seen much worse. “You were faking? What is wrong with you? You made me think I hurt you! I’m going back in there to tell them right now.”

“Evans, can you just unclench for a second? Are you actually telling me you’d rather be back in the gym playing badminton and having James look at you every time he scores a point?” Lily falters. “Anyway, the nurse isn’t even in on Tuesdays. We’re not going to get caught, okay? You don’t have to come with me, but you can’t go back.”

“You can’t tell me what to do.” Lily blows out a breath that makes her bangs fly up. “But fine. Show me how the other half lives. The other half being shameless delinquents, obviously.”

Lily trails her to the nurse’s office, which is empty as promised. Sirius starts rummaging through a drawer of supplies, as if there’s any possibility of something she hasn’t seen before. Lily hovers over the cot in the corner, as if an alarm will go off the second she rests her full weight on it. “How did you know no one would be here?”

Sirius shrugs. “I make it my business to know all the best spots to skip class.”

“Well, you’re right that this is more relaxing than trouncing you at badminton.” Lily finally slumps onto the cot. “We don’t have to talk, do we?”

“Don’t be an idiot.” Sirius pulls out a handful of tongue depressors and begins snapping them, one at a time. “That’s not at all in the spirit of cutting class. Now shut up.”

Lily seems caught between wanting to retort and not wanting to talk to Sirius anymore. After a pause, she chooses silence, which is only broken by the creaking of her cot and the _snap_ of wood.

Sometimes, very rarely, Sirius can tell that she’s going to do something stupid before she does it. It’s in the tensing of her shoulders, the simmering of something low in her gut. More often though, it takes her by surprise, so that she’s halfway through saying, “Go to prom with me,” by the time her brain catches up.

Lily drops the bottle of Advil she’s been shaking absentmindedly. “ _What_? You think you’re funny, Black. So you know I’m bisexual, it isn’t exactly a secret.”

“Think about it,” Sirius says, mostly to buy herself time to do so. Lily stares at her in horrified silence, and after a long moment, the logic slots into place. “Okay. Listen, I’ve been thinking. You want James off your back, right? And James is nothing if not loyal; he would never go after someone I was dating.”

“He’s loyal?” Lily scoffs. “What does that make you then?”

“Sick and fucking tired of having to hear about how your eyes look like sea glass, is what it makes me. I mean, you aren’t going to say yes to James one of these days, right? Like, this isn’t you playing hard to get or something?” Sirius knows immediately that she’s made a mistake by the way Lily, who has just barely paled from her last bout of righteous anger, turns bright red again.

Lily pushes herself off of the cot and crosses the room in a single bound, wagging her finger in Sirius’ face. “The idea that women play hard to get is a myth that men perpetuate to justify their refusal to recognize women as autonomous beings.”

Sirius leans back, her nose wrinkled. “Oh my God, do you _ever_ turn it off?”

“No.” Lily steps away and takes a couple of breaths. “I’m sorry. But no, I _don’t_ turn it off, because neither do they.”

“Right.” Sirius rolls her eyes and keeps going before Lily can interject and tell her to educate herself. “If you’re not ever going to say yes, then James needs to be snapped out of all of this. I’d basically be doing him a favor, if you think about it.”

“Right.” For just a second, Lily seems to genuinely be considering it, but she shakes her head. “Unfortunately, it’s still not compelling enough to justify all the time I’d have to spend with you.”

“Fine.” Sirius reaches for another argument, unable to determine even for herself why this feels so important. “Look, I asked around and the GSA is you, Mary MacDonald who Remus has assured me is an ‘S,’ and two freshman boys. Since you’re clearly one of those people whose whole life is school, I’m assuming you don’t know a ton of gay girls.”

Lily shrugs grudgingly, the slightest movement of her shoulders that tells Sirius her assumption was correct. “So?”

“ _So_ you’ve never dated a girl, but I’m sure you want to.”

Lily freezes in place for a moment, as if the sheer force of her indignation has robbed her of the capacity for movement. “Do you know how insulting that is? Fine, yes, there aren’t a lot of options right now, but that doesn’t mean I’m so desperate I’d let some straight girl use me in her pathetic revenge fantasy. I’m sorry Potter’s not into you, but get over it.” Lily swings her bag onto her shoulder and turns to leave.

“I’m not straight,” Sirius says, a bit shaky. She practiced a couple times in her bathroom mirror after she told James, but the whole thing just felt ridiculous, like the kind of thing someone who’s read _Eat Pray Love_ would do. As she listens to the way her voice lilts up at the end of what ought to be a definitive statement, she wishes she’d powered through the indignity of it and tried a bit harder. Lily turns very slowly on the spot. Sirius does her best to continue as if Lily isn’t staring at her like she’s just announced that she’s leaving school to start a moon colony. “Yeah, I guess I’m like, into girls or whatever.”

“Since _when_?” Lily snaps. “You’ve made fun of every initiative the GSA has ever done.”

“Since for-fucking-ever, isn’t that the point?” Sirius doesn’t want to say, “Since about a month ago,” so she adds, “I don’t have to agree with you to be gay, do I? I only ask ‘cause no one’s given me the rule book yet.”

Lily rolls her eyes, but she’s staked too much of her identity on being an impeccable gay resource to actually be able to stand her ground. “You’re right, you’re right. Of course we don’t have to be on the same page politically for your identity to be valid.”

“Yeah… That’s exactly how I would have put it." The prom idea seemed clever when Sirius first came up with it, or right after, once she'd actually thought of it, but she's beginning to doubt her own brilliance in the face of Lily's relentlessness.

Before Sirius can consider withdrawing the offer, Lily says, a challenging look on her face, “Fine. Deal. Whatever. I already have my ticket from when I was going with Severus, so why _not_.” Sirius is feeling just vulnerable enough that she resists the urge to say something rude, even before Lily qualifies that they were only attending as friends.

"Cool." Sirius pinches five tongue depressors between her fingers and tries to snap them all at once. Lily visibly swallows down another comment about the funding crisis and turns toward the door.

"I have one condition." Lily pauses, as if she thinks Sirius is going to beg for details. "I want to be there when you tell Potter. I want to see the look on his stupid, smarmy face."

Sirius barely has to think before responding. "Deal."

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings for homophobia as well as mentions of unhappy family life (but no explicit references to abuse). this chapter leans heavily on my aforementioned conviction that lily is very liberal & still growing into her politics.
> 
> i'm not sure why this took so long but i'm back on the horse now!

Lily’s house looks like exactly the kind of place that would produce a girl like her. It’s cozy, with light yellow shutters over each of the windows facing the street, and once they're inside, Sirius sees that it’s even cleaner than her home, live-in help and all. It's Lily personified, well-appointed but just uptight enough that Sirius can’t get comfortable. The living room is a monument to suburban mediocrity, sofa and ottoman covered in plastic, coffee table adorned with a couple of over-sized books in a self-conscious display of personality. Lily cranes her neck to peer down the hallway even though the only lights in the house are the ones she’s turned on. “I don’t think anyone should be home for a while, but let’s go upstairs anyway.”

Sirius certainly isn't going to argue in favor of meeting the people who made Lily Evans the way she is, so she dutifully troops up the stairs. Lily's room was probably decorated very lovingly when she was very young—pink walls with a lacy-looking trim along the bottom, frilly canopy bed—but it clearly hasn’t been updated since. It’s messier than Sirius would have expected; Lily notices a bra hanging out of a drawer seconds after Sirius does, rushing to tuck it away.

“Wow.” Sirius raises an eyebrow. James would explode if he knew about Lily Evans’ neon striped push-ups.

“Shut up, Black," Lily says, her face blotchily red.

“You’re going to have to start using my name if you want to be at all convincing.”

“I’ll worry about that when we have an audience. I’m going to get changed. Stay here and don’t mess anything up.” Lily gathers an armful of clothes and disappears into the hall. The idea of changing after school is entirely foreign to Sirius, who more often than not falls asleep with her boots still on, but she decides not to waste valuable snooping time pondering the many oddities of Lily Evans.

The desk, covered in chipping pink paint and too low for a teenager to use comfortably, is decorated with about a dozen frames turned face down.  Sirius picks one at random and flips it over to see a photo of Lily and Snape, young and round-faced, their arms around each other’s shoulders. The next is from last year’s state science fair where they took gold and no one heard the end of it for _months_. Snape looks unjustifiably smug for someone who Sirius could knock out of the running for valedictorian if she tried at all. Lily's smile is a bit more restrained than it was in the first picture, but wider than it's been in weeks.

“I haven’t wanted to get rid of them, which is stupid,” Lily says, her voice coming from directly behind Sirius, who just barely keeps herself from jumping. She's changed into a pair of stretched-out leggings and a massive T-shirt from last year’s AIDS Walk. With her face washed clean of makeup and her hair down around her shoulders, she looks sweet, which isn’t a word Sirius ordinarily uses. She stares long enough that Lily fidgets with the hem of her shirt before snapping, “Excuse me for wanting to be comfortable in my own house!”

“It’s not that.” Sirius doesn’t want to start this off on the wrong foot, but she certainly isn’t going to say that the last strain of doubt she had about her lesbianism just disappeared. “I’ve just never seen you out of your teacher’s pet uniform before.” Lily rolls her eyes and starts rummaging through her closet. The lack of eye contact is the only reason Sirius feels comfortable continuing, “And keeping the pictures isn’t stupid; I don’t know what I would do if James—“ She cuts herself off not because it’s too painful to think about, though it is, but because it’s a lie. She knows exactly what she would do: she would let James get away with it, and lock that part of herself down deep.

“Right, well.” Lily emerges wheeling a dry erase board in front of her. While Sirius watches, she draws a line down the middle and writes their names on either side. “There are certain things we’ll need to know about each other if anyone is going to buy this at all. Birthdays, siblings, stuff like that.” She folds a jumbo marker into Sirius’ hand when she doesn’t make a move to accept it, and then turns back to the board, like she's accustomed to being listened to.

Lily’s side of the list fills quickly, populated with her favorite color and the names of every cat she's ever had and all the clubs she leads. She looks at where Sirius has written her birthday and _Regulus, brother_. “Is that it? This was your stupid idea, so you could at least pretend to take it seriously.”

Sirius takes a step back. Written out like this, her life looks horrifically empty. She adds her parents, then crosses out both names, explaining as Lily watches, “We don’t talk.”

“Oh.” Lily looks at the half-full board with some consternation. “I’m sorry.”

Sirius rolls her eyes. There’s nothing she has less patience for than pity, especially from someone she has only just decided to tolerate. “I’m not. So they’re dicks. It’s not like it _matters._ ”

“Right…” Lily runs a hand through her hair. “That’s something to revisit at a later date, hopefully in a more productive manner. For now, we should probably figure out some kind of backstory. We don’t exactly run in the same circles. Why would we get together if not spite?” She sits down, patting the bedspread next to her, and Sirius perches on the edge of her mattress. She still isn’t totally comfortable in other people’s homes, sure that they’ll notice she doesn’t belong, carrying as she does the stench of the unhappy.

As a general rule, Sirius prefers not to think her behaviors through, as doing so nearly always leads to regret. She rolls her eyes toward the ceiling and regrets not living alone in the woods. “Well, you’re basically the school’s entire gay community, right? We could say, like, I reached out to—talk, or whatever, figure things out, and things progressed from there. It makes sense, I mean, I’m obviously hot and you aren’t totally hideous or anything.”

“Gee, thanks. But I suppose that works, if we cut out all the extraneous insults.” Lily pops the back of one of the picture frames, bending the clips, and slides the photo out with a surprising amount of care. She does that a couple more times before one gets stuck, and as she struggles with it, she says, “ _Did_ you want to talk about it? I know we aren’t—close, or anything, but I’ve been through this, and it isn’t easy on your own.”

Sirius scoffs. “I _have_ friends, Evans. I didn’t do all this just so we could have some stupid heart-to-heart.”

Lily holds up her hands in defeat. “I know you have friends, and they’re great. Or Remus is great, and I’m sure James has _some_ redeeming qualities somewhere buried deep down inside. Peter’s fairly unobjectionable, I suppose. But none of them know exactly what it’s like. Just. If you ever want to talk to someone who does, know that I’m willing.”

“Ugh, don’t make this a _thing_ , Evans. Not everyone feels the need to talk everything to death.”

“All right. Well, if you change your mind—”

“I won’t," Sirius snaps.

“But if you _do,_ then I’m open to it. Just so you know.” Lily turns away, handily missing when Sirius pretends to vomit. She turns her computer on, angling the screen so that Sirius won't be able to see when she types in her password. "I'm thinking that once we break the news to Potter, we can make it Facebook official. Post one of those insufferable couple's photos, you know?"

Sirius shrugs, not wanting to admit that she _doesn't_ particularly know. She only has a Facebook because James sat her down one day and forced her to register, and she's only ever active on it because he periodically steals her phone and uploads selfies he took of them without warning. He also sometimes checks her in at the stupid places he drags her to, like sporting goods stores and his family's weirdly liberal megachurch. It's strange to watch Lily scroll through her feed and see actual activity instead of just James' Google Maps screenshots of his latest jogging triumphs. Lily likes a status posted by the ACLU, and another by Planned Parenthood. Finally, she pulls up an album of two vaguely familiar people looking sickeningly, performatively in love with each other. They press their faces together in a café, in a museum, in a gazebo that looks like it's decked out for someone's wedding. Sirius makes every disgusted noise in her repertoire, but she has to concede that it is likely the most efficient way to spread the word, and that it will drive James absolutely insane.

"Of course, I probably shouldn't have changed." Lily tugs at a loose thread hanging from the hem of her shirt.

“You look fine,” Sirius says, turning red when Lily stares at her. “I just mean that it makes us seem like we’re comfortable around each other, like we’re not just grabbing coffee together every so often.”

“Surprisingly astute. Fine.” Lily shuts her computer down and tucks it away before moving closer very slowly, telegraphing every move like Sirius is a wild animal that might suddenly snap. It's ridiculous because the end result is still her practically in Sirius’ lap, which is not made any less weird by the fact that it took her a full minute to get there. Lily checks the tableau in her phone’s camera and groans. “Put your arm around my shoulders. No, not like that, like a _person_. No one’s going to believe we’re together if you act like you’re scared of catching something off me.” Sirius consciously relaxes, letting her hand drop onto Lily’s bare arm. She’s had more than enough boyfriends, but she’s never been properly nervous before. Lily slips the arm that isn’t holding her phone around Sirius' waist like it’s nothing. “Would it kill you to not make that weird face? It looks like I caught you in between vomiting fits and started snapping selfies.” Sirius laughs, and Lily takes a series of pictures before she can remember to be uncomfortable again.

Lily extricates herself from Sirius’ grasp, but stays close enough for her phone’s screen to be visible as she swipes back and forth through the photos, finally landing on one in the middle of the pack. They seem happy, actually, properly happy. In the one Lily’s chosen, Sirius is looking at her with this soft expression on her face, an aftereffect of her laughter that looks genuine without seeming goofy.

Sirius clears her throat and makes a conscious effort to sound normal. “Shit, we look good. That's a contender for sure.”

"Definitely. We should take a few more though, so that we'll have options. We could do one of those obnoxious kissing ones.” Lily pauses. “Unless you’re not comfortable with that.”

Sirius forces a smile. She can feel from the way it sits on her face that it’s a lot less genuine than the one in the picture. “We won’t be very convincing if we can’t even kiss, will we?”

“Are you sure? It’s not like anyone’s going to force us to prove it or something, and I don’t want to push you into anything.”

“ _Oh_ my God.” Sirius rolls her eyes, the indignation overpowering her nerves. “Let’s just do this, all right?”

Lily holds her phone out again and squeezes in closer to Sirius, who dries her slightly sweaty hands on her jeans. “Are you ready?” Sirius nods, and Lily leans in, maintaining a frankly upsetting amount of eye contact, and presses their lips together.

Sirius has gone a lot further with a lot of guys than a simple, slightly awkward peck for the sake of a posed photograph so there’s no excuse for the way she reacts like some prudish idiot, blushing and stammering her way through a hasty escape. “Text me the picture, all right?” She doesn't remember her bag, left carelessly in the doorway, until she's already in the hall, and decides to write it off as a lost cause. Lily doesn't come after her, which is a blessing.

She runs into someone on the stairs, and if she thought Lily was something of an uptight shrew, she has nothing on the girl who must be Petunia. Petunia looks at her like she's dirt, which is disconcerting, because the unearned sense of superiority Sirius' parents raised her with transitioned directly into the very earned sense of superiority that comes from being an actual genius. She doesn't have a lot of experience with people looking down on her. She's about to say something cutting about, really, any single quality on display, from the schoolmarm bun to the shoes with actual bows, when Petunia sweeps past her like she isn't even there.

Sirius hasn’t been allowed to learn to drive because her parents know the only thing between her and grand theft auto is the fact that she wouldn’t know what to do with a car once she got in. James has offered to teach her, but with him a call away and always willing to pick her up, she’s never felt the urge. Now she wishes she’d taken him up on it and saved the bills she steals from her mother’s purse to buy a crappy car. Anything that wouldn't have left her stranded on the wrong side of town, unable to call him because she has no reason to be here. Her Uber account is linked to his credit card, and anyway, her battery is at 3% and the closest car is a half hour away.

Lily pulls up next to her before she’s even made it two blocks, leans across the seats of her beat-up little car, and opens the passenger-side door. “Your house is miles away, idiot. Get in.”

Sirius considers refusing, weighs her dignity against the beads of sweat already collecting under her arms, and gets in. The car doesn’t feel too much better; Lily has the windows open instead of running the AC, and until they start really moving, all that’s done is let in the hot, stagnant air. She doesn’t intend to speak once she’s inside, but Lily needs directions, which would be fine except that Sirius can navigate between her house and James, and—gun to her head—James’ and school. There’s a fair bit of guessing, and lies told with confidence, until finally Lily pulls to the side of the road, prods at her phone for a few seconds, and then throws it into Sirius’ lap. “ _Don’t_ look at anything else.”

The third time Lily has to switch lanes at the last minute because Sirius has forgotten to advise her of a turn until they're practically in the intersection, she snaps, "How hard is it to look at what's on the screen and then tell it to me? Aren't you supposed to be smart?"

"Maybe you should actually learn to drive and stop being such a stereotype!" Sirius says, not because the ride has actually been bad, but because she suspects Lily might short circuit trying to decide between defending herself and all of womankind.

Instead of giving Sirius the satisfaction of a victory, Lily takes a theatrically deep breath and says, "I'm sorry I made you uncomfortable."

"You didn't make me uncomfortable," Sirius says, which is a lie, and so obviously one that she isn't sure why she's bothered. In eighth grade English, they spent an entire week on public speaking, and Sirius got to hold a buzzer and sound it every time someone said _um_ or _er_ or _like_. Their teacher's only advice was to take a pause instead, and all told, it was a deeply ineffective unit, but very fun, at least for Sirius. She's annoyed with herself now for not waiting five seconds to think up a lie worth telling. Lily takes a deep breath, and since they've been at the same school since kindergarten, Sirius knows that means she's about to say something insufferable and earnest. That leaves her with no choice but to tell the truth, or at least what she can figure of it. "I was just surprised by how different it is with a girl." She clears her throat. "Even if it was you."

Lily _hmm_ s like that's something unspeakably profound, and Sirius finds herself searching for something to say that will keep her from having to hear about the virtues of GSA membership. She doesn't get to find out, though, because Lily’s phone vibrates in her hand.  The notification tells her that it's from Petunia, and that it starts, "I suppose you can't help your...inclinations, but—" Sirius doesn’t say anything, and though Lily must have heard the buzz of a message received, she doesn’t either. Her hands tighten on the steering wheel, and the usual steel has gone out of her back.

If Sirius wanted to watch people emote unnecessarily, she would be with James right now, so she stares out her window and tries to figure out if she recognizes anything. Walking across the city is looking more appealing by the second. The next time she waits too long to give a direction, Lily doesn't complain, just flicks on her blinker and waits for an opportunity to U-turn. Sirius sighs. Guilt is a very irritating sensation, and she has felt enough of it lately to last a lifetime. "If I looked like your sister, I wouldn't start shit with other people."

"When we use appearance as a weapon against other women, we play right into the hands of the patriarchy," Lily says, but she says it with her face turned away, and Sirius can see from what's visible of her cheek that she's smiling. It almost makes the rest of the ride tolerable.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The most annoying thing about being Lily's fake girlfriend, not counting everything about her personality, is that while everyone else piles into James' luxury SUV with DVD players in the headrests, Sirius has to ride over in Lily's secondhand car and listen to her complain about the lack of diversity in the science department.
> 
> When they do anything that costs more than five dollars, James pays for everyone so that it won't be so awkward when he covers Remus. (Who only conceded the logic of this after an entire year of going straight home after school while James sponsored Sirius and Peter anyway to make a point about, presumably, the futility of resistance.) Lily grits her teeth when James orders five tickets and hands over his credit card, either because it's him or because something something the bourgeoisie, but she must put it together quickly enough, because she doesn't say anything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter deals primarily with familial homophobia so please take that into account before reading!
> 
> Thanks to the talented and patient [QueenRiza](https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenriza) for looking this over for me!

"I'm just saying," James says, his mouth full of lukewarm cafeteria pizza, "the team never would have had a shot without me. I don't think that's _arrogant_ so much as _accurate_."

Sirius is saved from having to respond by Peter's reliably over-the-top asskissing. It feels a bit like looking in a fun-house mirror, or else living inside a parable meant to shame her out of dependency. She has just _barely_ too much dignity to gush over James the same way, focusing instead on the dissection of her chicken nuggets, which are even more unappetizing inside-out. James has the look on his face that means he's on the verge of reenacting a game-winning goal, but before he can clear the bench, Lily draws even with their table. He immediately sits back down and tries to look dignified.

Lily pretends not to hear his exuberant greeting as she slides in next to Sirius, kissing her on the cheek before she has time to react. "Hey, hun." Sirius just barely stops herself from rolling her eyes. She explicitly said no pet names; she has a picture of it written on a whiteboard in Lily's prissy, curlicue handwriting.

"Is this a joke?" James asks, sounding like he doesn't think it's a very funny one.

Lily's arm tightens around Sirius' waist. "Do you think two girls dating is a _joke_?"

"No!" James would ordinarily be deeply flustered by the assertion that he's anything other than a perfectly enlightened specimen, but indignation allows him to retain his composure. "But Sirius hates you even more than you hate me." Sirius has never seen James properly angry before, rather than annoyed or defensive. It's sort of underwhelming. His face turns a bit red and his hands clench into fists around his lunch bag, the paper crinkling. "And she's my friend, I thought."

Sirius rolls her eyes. It's a dick move and she knows it, but it's not like she stole Lily out of their marriage bed or something. James slams his hands down on the table, or at least he clearly _means_ to slam them. In reality, it's more of an ineffectual slap followed by a storm-out. Sirius sighs. "I guess I should deal with this," she says, aiming for conspiratorial even though it's pretty obvious Peter and Remus aren't on her side.

Lily squeezes her shoulder and says, voice syrupy, "Go get 'em, babe."

Sirius finds James in an empty classroom, on the floor with his back pressed against the wall. He doesn't look up when she walks in, which is new, and she finds that she doesn't know how to respond to it. He says finally, "Sirius, I'm—" He shakes his head. "I don't know if we should talk right now. I just don't understand why you did this."

It would be really easy. She could give the answer that she and Lily agreed on, and James' eyes would soften and his shoulders would slump and he would need a minute or two, but he'd hug her and move on. And she's sick of it, honestly, sick of being treated like some hopeless idiot who can't be trusted to make decisions for herself. It was nice at first, realizing there were virtually no consequences for her actions, that she could do whatever she wanted and James would chalk it up to her difficult childhood, which wouldn't even be, actually, _wrong_ , just kind of an over-simplification. James' whole thing is that she's a good person with issues, but the reality is that she's a bad person _because_ of her issues.

"I did it because I wanted to," she says. "Because you were right. She's hot, and not as insufferable as I thought she was. We started talking, and shit happened, and she was never going to say yes to you so it doesn't matter anyway."

James stares at her for a long, awful moment. She expects him to yell, maybe to throw something, which would be nice because then they would be in her wheelhouse. She could yell and throw something too, and then they would both storm off, and he couldn't be so goddamn high and mighty all the time. Instead, he takes a couple deep breaths and says, "You're my best friend and you always will be. I need some time, but I'll find a way to be happy for you." He stares at his hands folded in his lap. "And I'm sorry if—I'm sorry for whatever I did that made you feel like you couldn't come to me about this sooner. I just want you to feel totally, you know, actualized in your identity as a lesbian."

Sirius groans. "Oh my _God_. That's not what this is _about_." She tries to remember what the guidance counselor said about her on the phone with her mother, the thing that earned her a genuine smile for the first time in years, if not ever. "It's about my poor impulse control and lack of compassion."

"I wish you wouldn't talk about yourself that way." James looks at her like he's posing for the picture on the back of a self-help book, like he's focusing all of his energies on radiating generosity and pity. "I can't pretend to be pleased, but I'm glad you have another person to care about you. Now can I have some space?"

She returns to the table without James, and when everyone looks to her for an explanation, she says, "Fucking asshole," loudly enough that the cafeteria monitor actually looks up from his sudoku for roughly half a second before deciding, presumably, that the school doesn't pay him enough to intervene. Remus looks between her and the spot James has now vacated like he can't decide who to support. James is usually right, but he also isn't here, which makes siding with Sirius the path of least resistance. Or maybe he's just wondering if he can take James' seat. It's the best one at the table, the only one with four even-length legs and an underside that isn't totally covered in chewed gum. Sirius let him claim it years ago because she thought she was in love with him. She can't imagine what excuse Remus and Peter have, besides being pussies.

"What did he say?" Lily asks, leaning into Sirius, which shouldn't be possible considering how close they already were. Sirius is learning quickly that Lily is always, always up for a fight, which would be a lot more charming if she weren't looking to fight about abortion and adoption rights for same-sex couples and racial bias in death penalty trials. Sirius figures she actually does believe in all that stuff as strongly as she claims to, but also, clearly, she has some anger inside of her that she needs to get out. When Sirius wants to throw a tantrum, she just _does_ it, and that's called freedom.

" _He_ apologized to _me_. For not being fucking—" She tries to remember how James said it, but everything she can come up with sounds absurd (read: like something Lily would say). "I just want him to trust me, to treat me like a person, not this freak he's stuck taking care of."

Remus looks exhausted, which is barely worth noting except that it seems pointed, like what's making him feel like he has one foot in the grave is how she has the gall to have problems. "What, exactly, was your ideal outcome here?" he asks, which is the kind of thing he wouldn't ordinarily have the balls to say to her. Maybe being in love with James and then not in love with James and then a lesbian has softened her image. She resists the urge to worm out from under Lily's arm, which landed back around her shoulders the second she sat down.

She can't say that she wanted James to be mad at her, or that she wanted to hurt him, because those are both bad answers, as in the answers a bad person would give. She can't say, either, that just because she really _isn't_ in control of her actions a lot of the time, doesn't mean she wants him to coddle her.

Lily saves her, says, "It's not un _reasonable_ for her to be upset," and she sounds genuinely angry, like she's forgotten that they're only pretending to be able to tolerate each other. Like they didn't plot exactly this situation, like Lily didn't discuss how sad James was going to be with a relish that made Sirius feel disloyal. "It's not her fault he has this fixation on me."

Remus says, "You're right," not one second too soon, since Lily is nearly impossible to stop once she has some momentum. "I just think this could have been handled with slightly more grace. I'm sure we can all concede that point."

Lily wrinkles her nose. "I don't think we owe him anything."

"Maybe _you_ don't," Remus says, his eyes fixed on Sirius.

"Well," Lily says, perfectly matching Remus' primness. "Agree to disagree, I suppose."

 

James reappears not even five minutes before the end of the period. He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. He smiles without seeming particularly genuine about it. "Lily, we were planning to go to the movies after school. Would you like to come with us?"

The correct answer is very obviously _no_ , ideally followed up with a lie that gets Sirius out of it too. Instead, Lily looks at her, looks at James, looks at her hands, and says, "Yeah, all right." Which is when Sirius remembers that for most of her life, Lily had one friend, and now has no friends.

James' smile wobbles a little, and then he says, "Great!" with a degree of cheer that's a bit much even for him. Lily must know that she wasn't supposed to agree, but she probably thinks backing down is a betrayal of Susan B. Anthony or something, because she just nods sort of decisively and asks where they're meeting.

They all have English after lunch, so the sensible thing would be for them to walk over together, but what happens is that James jumps up the second the bell rings and disappears, like they're all supposed to believe he's that desperate to get a front row seat to another interminable discussion of _The Great Gatsby_ , which is about as long as a picture book and has occupied them for nearly three months now, mostly because Lily has derailed all of their classes talking about how it's a groundbreaking gay text. Sirius sat behind her one day and saw that she had pages and pages of color-coded, bullet-pointed notes. She could see that one started, "In Ancient Greece," and another said, "The AIDS crisis..."

Lily and Sirius stick around a minute longer, whispering and giggling like they're so caught up in each other's company that they can't think about things like academia. Remus watches them for a second, his patchy backpack slung over his shoulder, and he makes a face like he wants to tell Sirius how _disappointed_ he is. It doesn't feel at all triumphant, nothing like she'd pictured. Mostly she feels like she just kicked the one person on the Sirius-is-not-an-asshole train right onto the tracks, and now she barely remembers why. Lily has her face really close to Sirius', and she's smiling in this kind of small, secretive way, and she says, "It must be _so_ isolating to be the only girl in your social circle."

"Ugh," Sirius whispers directly into Lily's ear. "Kill me."

 

The most annoying thing about being Lily's fake girlfriend, not counting everything about her personality, is that while everyone else piles into James' luxury SUV with DVD players in the headrests, Sirius has to ride over in Lily's secondhand car and listen to her complain about the lack of diversity in the science department.

When they do anything that costs more than five dollars, James pays for everyone so that it won't be so awkward when he covers Remus. (Who only conceded the logic of this after an entire year of going straight home after school while James sponsored Sirius and Peter anyway to make a point about, presumably, the futility of resistance.) Lily grits her teeth when James orders five tickets and hands over his credit card, either because it's him or because something something the bourgeoisie, but she must put it together quickly enough, because she doesn't say anything.

James picked a standard, brainless action movie with big guns and bigger muscles, which would be annoying enough but is made infinitely more so by the fact that Lily is sitting next to Sirius grinding her teeth the entire time. Thank God that she does, despite all indications to the contrary, have some grasp of decorum; she waits until the lights come on to launch into a tirade about artistic ethics and commercialism and the military-industrial complex that feels scripted, like she's been running through it in her head since the very first muzzle flash.

"Babe," Sirius says, just so she can add, "Shut up," and not totally blow her cover. Lily's face turns vividly, violently red. They were supposed to grab dinner after the movie, but James, who's looked positively ghostly since lunch, begs off early, and when he offers Remus a ride home, Remus says, "Oh God, yes." Peter goes where James goes, obviously, which leaves Lily and Sirius standing alone in the theater lobby.

" _Thanks,_ " Sirius says once the door has swung firmly shut.

"Oh, please," Lily scoffs. "I'm sorry if you were enjoying the heartbroken gawking, but somehow I doubt it. Look, I'm guessing it would make me a really bad fake girlfriend if I told you to walk home, so just come on."

Lily's phone rings before Sirius has even shut the passenger-side door. Sirius, who can feel a headache cresting, says, "Don't pick up."

Lily looks at her, looks at the phone, and then answers, a broad, insincere smile on her face. "Hi, Mom," she says. She looks over again, slightly skittish, and then, in a tone Sirius knows intimately, that of someone hoping to sound tough, she says, "I'm with my girlfriend." A pause, and Lily repeats, "Girlfriend," though it was perfectly clear the first time. Still in the same combative voice, she says, "I was thinking she could come to dinner."

Sirius says, "Or I could just shoot myself in the face and have basically the same amount of fun." She means for it to be audible on the other end, but Lily doesn't react like her mother has just asked her why she's dating such an awful girl, or swooned in horror, or _anything_ , so that's annoying.

Lily hangs up and starts the car without looking at her. Sirius resists the urge to grab the wheel and yank it, but files it away as a possible strategy. "What the _fuck_?"

"You didn't hear her."

"Parents were _not_ a part of this." Sirius figures she'll cave, probably, but only if Lily really begs. She doesn't make a habit of doing favors, but she has the feeling no one else is going to be making plans with her for a while, so there's no good reason not to.

But Lily doesn't beg. She doesn't even say please the _once_. She says, "It'll be fun. Aren't you always looking for new people to be an asshole to?" Which is a good point, honestly, made a lot more compelling by the fact that she doesn't stop the car.

In elementary school, the girls who weren't Sirius went through a paper doll phase while she was sitting on the sidelines of James' soccer games and glowering with abandon. She was given a set once, a man and a woman lovingly pressed out of a book full of them, and though the concept baffled her, she kept them. When they accidentally went out with the laundry, she cried—lesbian clue number one, needy unstable clue number one thousand. They came back wrinkled and small and indistinct. She kept them another month. Lily's parents look like that, shrunken and faded, their features hard to make out. They're broad strokes portraits of a 1950s man and wife. The father has his feet kicked up on one of the coffee-table books, a beer in hand, and the mother doesn't do anything except remind Sirius to take her shoes off in the house and look generally harried. Sirius can sort of imagine how coming home to this would make her want to be a loud, angry nightmare all the time too.

It's hard to look at, even for her, and _her_ main concern with being a lesbian is that she isn't sure who's meant to be paying for stuff. She thinks, "At least I had a strong female role model," and has to bite down a near-hysterical laugh.

Once they're all seated, they stare at each other in fraught silence until Mrs. Evans clears her throat. "How long have the two of you been—" She pauses, her cheeks pink. She looks to her husband for a rescue, but his head is bent over his plate. Petunia has been fondling the cross around her neck since they first walked in. (Lily said, in a furious whisper, "We never even go to church. She only wears that necklace because she _knows_ it was supposed to go to me when our grandmother passed.") Having established that the only worthwhile member of her family is the one she's eyeing like a feral animal, Mrs. Evans finishes, "spending time together?" so belatedly that Sirius has practically forgotten the question.

Lily, who orchestrated this whole ridiculous situation, who wanders the halls at school berating every guy who looks at her for his male gaze, who once raised her hand in _math_ class to say that marriage is a hetero-patriarchal institution that ought to be abolished but until it is, gay marriage should be legal everywhere, _that_ Lily, fucking chokes. She says, "Um," she says, "Well," she says, "I—"

Sirius grabs her hand, which involves sort of smacking the fork out of it but is still surprisingly smooth. "Three months," she says. She does what she can to summon the please-love-me voice that sometimes comes out of her, unbidden, at the Potters'. "She's been wanting me to meet you all for _ages_ , but sometimes you just want to stay in your own little bubble. I'm sure you remember what that feels like." Mrs. Evans flinches at the implication that their relationship could have something in common, or else that they might go the distance. Sirius grins harder. Everyone at the table but her looks on the verge of combustion.

"I can't believe I almost invited Vernon over tonight," Petunia says, her lip curled. "My _boy_ friend."

"Oh, you have a boyfriend?" Sirius asks, eyes just a bit too wide to be polite. "Maybe we could go on a double date sometime." Petunia recoils so dramatically that she nearly falls from her seat. "I think that would be fun, Lils, don't you?" Lily's foot stomps on Sirius' under the table, which is the only sign that she has any personality left in her at all. Sirius squeezes her hand harder. "We could go to a softball game, maybe."

If Lily weren't having a crisis about her screwed-up family—which is basically the equivalent of Sirius inviting James over and getting embarrassed when her mother screamed obscenities at him, meaning _stupid_ and _predictable_ —she'd probably already be halfway through a tirade about stereotyping. Sirius wants to prefer her like this, and is surprised to find that she doesn't.

 

"I should take Sirius home," Lily says, the first time she's spoken in a half hour at least. Sirius has been carrying the conversation, which is resolutely _not_ the kind of thing she does, but she went silent for a couple minutes and Lily's parents started talking about their _water bill,_ so it fell to her to keep the table focused on topics that were mutually tolerable. Which was school, basically; she plumbed the absolute depths of her psyche to find something worthwhile to say about AP class selection.

"What the fuck was that?" she demands the second the door's shut behind them, probably loudly enough that Lily's family could hear if they had any interest whatsoever in prolonging the encounter. Lily doesn't say anything, and Sirius leans in, feeling herself getting agitated. "No, really, what the _fuck_. You're the one who brought me here, where I did _not_ want to be, to meet your parents, who I have _never_ wanted to meet, and then you—" She sees that Lily has gone stiff and is staring into one of the manicured bushes framing her front door like it might hold the answers to life itself. Sirius has a burst of the sort of insight James is always wishing she'd develop: she's being an asshole. But she isn't going to apologize. She isn't going to turn over some kind of new leaf, and if she were, Lily certainly wouldn't be the first person she'd reach out to. She does figure, well, that doesn't mean she has to make things worse.  "Let's just go, okay?"

"Yeah," Lily says, still shrubbery-fixated. She shakes her head and when she turns, she looks almost like herself again, put-together and only very slightly manic. "Yes. _Yes_. It's getting late."

Once they've been in the car for a few minutes, Lily says, "I—regret what happened in there."

Sirius swallows down all the sarcastic comments threatening to burst out of her. Instead, she says, "Family sucks."

Lily shrugs, her eyes firmly turned to the road. "That doesn't happen to me. The tongue-tied thing. The social pressure." Her breath hitches, and Sirius thinks for one horrifying moment that she's going to cry, but apparently she's just caught herself in a less-than-perfect moment for the second time tonight. "Not that it makes people weak to be susceptible to the forces of oppression. It just doesn't happen to _me_."

The thing about Lily that's making this scheme so unbearable is that every time she says anything even kind of interesting, she walks it straight back. Sirius cares about the opinions of about one and one half people in the entire world—not that Regulus isn't a person, and not that he doesn't matter, but he objectively one-hundred-percent is _not_ going to leave her, behind or otherwise, and so she doesn't have to take him into account the same way. But the moment between coming out to James and him saying nothing could change them was the worst of her life. And it was just so mundane, so totally _not_ the kind of fear she has. She says, "I get it."

Lily sort of scoffs, like the concept of them being on the same side of anything is so nuts, but what she says is, "I want to thank you for what you did in there.  You didn't have to. You could have totally checked out when I did, and I wouldn't blame you. And it would have been— It's already going to be so mortifying going back there, but it could have been so much worse." Lily stops at a red light even though they're the only car on the road. Sirius wants to scream. "I know you were probably just having fun messing with my family, but it means a lot to me even if it doesn't to you."

Sirius shrugs, staring hard out her window so that she won't have to engage too closely with anything happening inside of the car. "Well, no fake lesbian relationship would be complete without some freaked out parents."

Lily almost laughs, but doesn't, and says, "Yeah. I should have asked—how do your parents feel about this sort of thing?"

"Oh, they're super supportive, because _that_ makes sense with anything about me. Think, Evans."

And then, even though they only have to pretend to like each other when they have an audience, Lily locks eyes with her in the mirror and smiles. It's sort of a weak effort, but Sirius makes herself smile back.


End file.
